Closed (sort of)
TEOM as you know it has been closed. I will keep it up for reference but it no longer will receive tutorial updates.
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Thanks for the support throughout all these years :)
Illustrator CS2
Characters and Accents
It wasn’t very long ago when I was finally able to get rid of something that bothered me since Illustrator 10: after a while, my keyboard shortcuts would stop working and not all keys would appear correctly when entering text, mostly special characters and accents.
To be honest I always thought that this was a bug in Illustrator, because nothing could explain why this happened. Nothing, except a little stupidity in Windows.
I believe that most users don’t alternate between input languages in Windows – and most likely don’t even know that’s possible -, but chances are that they use keyboard shortcuts, specially with programs that they are familiar with. I am one of those users.
I run a copy of Windows XP in Portuguese, but all other programs I use are in English. My keyboard is also set for the Portuguese language but [here’s where the stupidity enters] with a special key combination, the input changes into English, and “/” is converted to “?”, “á” is “;” and so on… And what key combination is that? The incredibly common, Ctrl + Shift. Yeap, that’s right, the base for so many shortcuts in so many programs is also what changes the input language in Windows. And the worst is, besides it being such a common combo, that the setting is on by default, from the minute that you install Windows.
And how do you fix it?
Go to My Computer » Control Panel » Regional and Language Options (double-click to open).
» 
» 
Open the Languages tab, click on Details » Key Settings » Change Key Combination (or something like that) and uncheck both boxes.
Annoyances · Jun 08, 2007 ·